The Book-buyer's Weekend that Wasn't

This last Saturday morning, I walked down to Manchester's book store with an hour to spare. [I took the camera and posted some photographs below.] The last time I was in there, their philosophy section was overflowing with stacks on the floor and on top of the shelves. My plan was to go through them with great care in hopes of discovering a (cheap) book by the French phenomenologist, Henri Bergson. No luck there. I did talk myself out of a good $20 in books. It was a trend that would be repeated an hour or so later at the CBD booksale.

Why they don't make booksales better for children, I don't know. As it is, Kara wasn't there five seconds before she was melting down. Lynn-nore, too, started feeling contractions the moment her feet touched that concrete floor. I had a list of books that my Dad and some friends had asked me to pick up, as well as a keen interest in finding a copy of Mounce's Morphology of Biblical Greek. Alas, no luck on that: out of print. There were at least a dozen scratch n dent's that were purchase-temptations, but, yet again, I talked myself out of all but one.

One thing that did happen at the sale. I ran into Allan Emory, Hendrickson's Old Testament editor. He and I chatted for a few minutes, I introducing myself and talking about the position, and him giving me some back-story. Turns out, Hendrickson has been overwhelmed with applications for the position. They've had CV's from overseas! Allan thought it would be another month before they could begin to think about second-tier interviews. Had this news come a few weeks ago, I'd have been a wreck. But come Friday, I really had given it over to the Lord. It is really up to him, after all. I'd been struggling to do it the entire month, and he finally took the burden of worrying about it from me on Friday. So, when Allan was telling me about this, I took it in, but it didn't tempt me to despair.

Everyone at church on Sunday was so concerned about Lynn-nore, with offers to help and concerned comments, etc. How do people get along without a church family? Lynn-nore herself is feeling contractions every day, but they are safe enough as long as she tries to rest and not over-exert herself. She has been very good about taking a nap each day (something that would come easy for me, but isn't so easy for her - she is such a "doer.")

Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth were over last night to hang out, eat and watch the Acadamy Awards. Sir Walter had this great idea of printing ballots off the web, which we did, and so had a good time scoring it and then seeing how many we guessed correctly. I actually won, with 8 correct guesses! Lynn-nore said, "How did you get so many right with your head always stuck in a book?" Even with the ballots, it is an exercise in toleration to watch celebrities. The older I get, the more I really cannot stand celebrity, celebrities and anything to do with them. The self-congratulation, the "we're famous so we must know everything" do-gooding, political sideshowing for the left, and, let's face it, the amount of money those people bring down for learning a few lines and being born beautiful. I'm quite curmudgeonly about it, and so had best stop myself now.

Who Scrabb'd my Cheese? 

Craft Girl (4) 

Knock for Singer Sargent 

Seaside No. 1 Feb 26 2005 

One Elm Street 

I asked Kara to pick an animal, draw it and write its name. This is the result. It's coming right at you! Can you see the trunk? The feet? 

Kara Loves this Green Dress 

Valentines Day Photo 

Hartford Sem Sends Some Love & Hendrickson-Day

Good news this morning, I received the following email first thing:

> Dear Dr. Chittom,
>
> Your name has been put forward by Isabel Wollaston as a possible
> reviewer for the journal "Reviews in Religion & Theology". Starting
> with the September 2005 issue, Hartford Seminary (hartsem.edu) will
> partner with Blackwell Publishing (Blackwell-synergy.com) to produce
> the journal. Ian Markham, Worth Loomis and I are forming the new
> editorial team.
>
> We are currently inviting readers to review books for this issue, and
> would like to offer you the opportunity to review "Recovering
> Theological Hermeneutics: An Incarnational-Trinitarian Theory of
> Interpretation" by Jens Zimmerman. Review articles should be
> approximately 3,000 words and should be emailed to me in MS Word
> format by April 1, 2005.
>
> If you would like to review this book, please let me know and I will
> forward it to you as soon as possible.
>
> In peace,
> Christy Lohr
> Editorial Assistant
> Hartford Seminary

I did not hesitate to send her my contact information.

Today is "call Hendrickson" day. Please keep that conversation in your prayers. The Lord is our provider: "give us this day our daily bread."

On another note, I fixed the "comment" option for this blog yesterday. Turns out, I had it set to accept comments only from those with Blogger accounts. Whoops! It is much much easier now to comment and dialogue with any of the posts you see here. Oh, and if anyone wants to email Lynn-nore and encourage her to begin posting, that would be fine with me :-)

Finally, if you remember, I'd mentioned an article about providence and the United States in an earlier post? Here is a link to the book review in First Things on American Providence.

Ha' Symposia

Everything seems akimble - this morning it was my computer. Worked fine yesterday, but today it refuses to boot. The tech guy came, tried, and went away to consult the Oracle. That was hours ago. He has not yet returned. John put me on another computer; but, hey, all my active files are on the C:\ drive! This has led to a bifurcated day in which the minority of the time I'm scraping at sometimes-year-old spreadsheets in search of an action point and the majority of the time I'm on the Perseus website reading Plato's Symposium.

That said, note the following quote:

[183d] ... the affair [of love] is no simple thing; you remember we said that by itself it was neither noble nor base, but that it was noble if nobly conducted, and base if basely. To do the thing basely is to gratify a wicked man in a wicked manner: ‘nobly’ means having to do with a good man in a noble manner. By ‘wicked’ we mean that popular lover, who craves the body rather than the soul: [183e] as he is not in love with what abides, he himself is not abiding. As soon as the bloom of the body he so loved begins to fade he ‘flutters off and is gone,' leaving all his speeches and promises dishonored: whereas the lover of a nature that is worthy abides throughout life, [184a] as being fused into one with the abiding.

2 thoughts. (1) The Symposium is ultimately a dialogue about the nature of true reality, that which "abides." (2) The love being talked about is pederasty; the "body" being craved is that of young boys by older men. Indeed, young men are encouraged to act virtuously and with wisdom in preferring older men to any other lovers, for older men are "untinged with wantonness," and have, "the robuster nature and a larger share of mind."[181c] Loving such is loving that which lasts, which is lawful, and which is oriented toward virtue. Love male-to-male is, thus, a true expression of love which ennobles and makes heroic.
I bring this up because it exposes to view a deep and interesting "given" in Western philosophy: that one can know only as one has some relation to what is known. Love of man to woman, and vice versa, is a lesser, "bodily" love, a lust, which does not lead to virtue and knowledge. But love of same-for-same is higher, etc. This is becoming long so I will make my observations propositional. (1) The platonic (Greek) distinction between body and spirit is discovered in love-of-same, in this case, spirit (mind) is preferred and body (matter) denigrated. (2) The Biblical view (and here is my insight), however, goes in exactly the opposite direction. By making male and female, though opposite, both in the image of God (again a not-like, so that God is not like human beings), opposition is preferred. Therefore, one comes to know, to love, and become virtuous not on the basis of one's likeness, but on the basis of one's unlikeness: does this sound like revelation to you? Does this sound not like a relation of equals (sameness) but of interrelated not-equals, say inter-dependent, mutually submissive persons: In other words, does this sound trinitarian to you? Does this remind you of grace, where we are loved not because of some quality we have but for love's sake despite unlikeness? Does this remind you of revelation, where knowledge is not based on one's ability to understand because what is contemplated is like in some way (I can know about a material world because I, myself, am material) but upon the gracious will of that which is higher revealing itself to that which is lower?

Our Pine Cone Family! Left to Right - Daddy, Mama, Joanna, Kara & Baby Caleb 

It is just Kara! 

Another Member of the Family? 

What We Learned

We were at Beverly Hospital until 4pm this afternoon. One of the nurse midwives met us there, and they put Lynn-nore up for the longest time in a room. She tried to sleep, watched TV, and ate lunch, all hooked up to a machine monitoring her contractions. All of it led to a series of ultrasounds which gave us a chance to watch Caleb shadowboxing, rolling over, scratching his head, and otherwise hanging out in "the lounge" (which is my word for the bottom-most part of Lynn-nore's uterus where he likes to hang around away from prying hands and the occasional knee-to-the-stomache of his big-sister.) The real purpose of these ultrasounds, well, hold on...

See, medical science can't yet really tell the difference between contractions which mean nothing and contractions which move things along. In our case, the latter sort would be, as the midwife said "bad." I won't go into the details of what they were looking for, but the ultrasounds would tell us which sort of contractions Lynn-nore was having.

Praise God, they turned out to be the kind that is okay. As a matter of fact, this was very worthwhile news, because now we know that these don't necessarily mean Lynn-nore has to go on bedrest, and they don't mean "head to the hospital for another IV drip." That only comes if there is something different about them. As it is, Lynn-nore and I have discussed ways of upping her rest quotient, but, on the whole, the news is good (and even useful.)

Lynn-nore having contractions

Lynn-nore started suspecting she was having contractions last night at 8:30pm. By 11, she had called Pat, our midwife, and we were on our way to the hospital. Pat met us there. She confirmed that Lynn-nore was having contractions and put her on an IV for hydration. By 12:30, things had slowed, but not stopped, so Pat gave her a shot of Tributeline (sp). That seemed to do the trick. Pat was mildly concerned, though everything seemed intact. She said that it is rare to lose a baby at 18 weeks, and we talked about different ways of keepings Lynn-nore's hyperactive uterus quiet. We were home again at 1:40.

Now it is 10:44am, and Lynn-nore called me at work to let me know she is having contractions again. Pat scheduled an ultrasound for later today. I'm not wholly sure whether I'm going to try and switch hours around or what, but keep the baby in your prayers.

Julia Gelfand on the future of digital information

"It is clearer to see today how when Mark Weiser coined the term, ubiquitous computing, we were not sure what the scaling of being surrounded by computers everywhere would involve. Not only are we using desktops, travelling with computers, carrying them all the time, wearing them, they are totally embedded in our world. Thus, we are challenged to see how we will design, use, and understand the elements of a ubiquitous computing world...

[Speaking then of grey literature] Personally, I have to conclude that grey literature will have a new home in the spectrum of digital libraries [and in the ] new repository systems that are being hosted by a variety of institutions where there is a welcoming "stewardship" ... The homecoming and lifespan of this new content in a connected context may be shorter but the diversity may be richer and "new analysis environments" will evolve and new communities of collaborators may result. As Clifford Lynch and Charles Henry recently ponder the future of digital libraries in interviews conducted for Ubiquity, Henry suggests, that "something very different will emerge -- something that is shared, collaborative, that doesn't belong to you or to me or to any particular institution, but belongs to everyone and no one perhaps at the same time. This is where a lot of academic information will reside 50 years from now. It will be very interesting to see how [institutions will navigate] through these contradictory impulses."

~ Julia Gelfland, U of California, "The Ubiquity of Grey Literature in a Connected Context."

Morning Snowfall

Snow this morning: wearing boots, wiping the truck off, stomping feet and brushing flakes. There were very few people on the road in to work - just the huge, shadowy groups of plows moving slowly in menacing caravans. Lynn-nore thought this may be a vacation day for me, but that is not the case. It is a regular workday. (sigh) I really don't want to be here today. I'm more than a quart low on reading time, and would rather take a few hours at Starbucks than care whether this or that database has been queried or this or that report has been finalized. Lord deliver me from the Egypt of meaningless labor!

Kara was up early and in a good mood. She wanted to watch, what else, Thomas the Tank Engine this morning. Last night we thought she might be coming down with my cold, but she was bouncy, clear-eyed and energetic at 6:40am.

Sir Walter Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth are on a plane today for Florida. I hope the snow doesn't delay them too much: they both could use a vacation. Indeed, this week is vacation for schoolkids everywhere - which accounts for a lot of sleepy houses I passed on the way in.

Mom and I were talking a little last night about "depth" in Bible Study. She asked me what I thought "depth" was. I've been thinking about that, and here's my answer. I think "depth" is any time I open the Scripture to hear, and, by the time I close the Scripture, I've learning something about it and read it differenly than I did before. Let me try another definition too: depth in Bible Study derives from seeing a text in its total covenantal context. In other words, I don't just read Luke chapter 3, but I understand its role in the larger sweep of Luke/Acts, and, indeed, against its proper Old Testament context. This is the way you build up a good biblical theology. In my opinion, the feeling of depth and the investigation of solid biblical theology seem to always go together.

Thomas the Barnes & Noble Engine

The local Barnes & Noble has a Thomas the Tank Engine railway set that is infamous in its popularity. Kids come from all around - how is it put in the Gospel of Mark: "And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out..." (1.5) - that's how it is. Kara loves to go to Barnes & Noble and play with this play set, and, so, I took her today. We joined dozens of other children knotted about the table, surrounded in a ring of parents who were, themselves, reading magazines and other books. I, myself, joined their number, grabbing a copy of Henri Bergson's Matter and Memory and settling down cross-legged before a rack of junior readers. Kara always has a good time. She is so polite, introducing herself by name to other children and sharing. I was so proud of her today, she played so well with so many different "kinds" of children. There is the helpful older girl, the shy same-age girl, the bratty younger boy, the violent older boy, the spaced out boy. Call it a watering hole for the local kindergemeinde. We were there for a good two hours today, giving Lynn-nore and Joanna time to nap. As for me, I'm just about to begin an assault on Heidegger's Being & Time. All part of trying to flesh out this new direction I've been mentioning.

To Bergson and Heidegger, I must add the french philosopher, Jean Baudrillard /bow-ree-ARD/. A number of his essays are on the web. There is a knot, a cord, that ties the work of these men to everything else: to Barth, Moltmann and Augustine. That cord is the self and memory.

First, from Baudrillard:

"It is not true that in order to live one has to believe in one's own existence. There is no necessity to that. No matter what, our consciousness is never the echo of our own reality, of an existence set in "real time." But, rather, it is its echo in "delayed time," ... only in our sleep, our unconscious, and our death are we identical to ourselves."

And Michael Gelven writes in A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being And Time":

"...we could describe the problem of Being and Time as a phenomenological description of the transcendental [real] self. This means that it describes that first order of our consciousness by which we are made aware of ourselves as the free and determining factor in our own existence and in our comprehension of the external world."(3)

Greek & Hints

First thing every Saturday morning, 7-8am, is Greek with John G. He has so taken to the language, I will never catch him now. Like Wes, John has a remarkable eye for detail which serves both of them well in any number of pursuits, be it art history or the phonal characteristics of a dental in crasis.

Lynn-nore woke up nervous last night, worried about the baby. Today she worked herself too hard. We dredged up stuff from the basement and did a grocery run.

I'm nearly over my illness, but my energy is still zapped and my head the clapper in a great, universal gong.